1331 Friendly User

I have this friend who works for a radio station. And he is constantly amazed by how people try to use him to get their word out. Not charities, people who want to make a profit, and make even more by using him for free.
Recently he got a request from a large national company that makes its money selling tickets to movies. They also make money running advertisements before the movies in their theatres.
This company asked my friend to post a link on his station’s Facebook page to one of their pages that gave a “free” coupon for a food item. In order to get the coupon you had to sign up as a “friend” on their Facebook account. The person that wanted to use my friend said she was hoping this coupon would go viral.
This is wrong on so many levels.
The radio station where the guy works has spent considerable time, effort, and creativity building a loyal listener base. It’s also spent a huge amount of time and trouble building a website. It also spends a huge amount of time on the radio directing people to the website. Not to mention the huge amount of money it took to equip and build the station itself.
It supports all those endeavors by running advertisements. Which it charges for. Like the movie place charges for the ads it runs before movies.
And so for the movie place to ask the station to post a coupon whose intent is to build its Facebook base, for free, is the height of audacity.
It’s like Audacity 3-D.
And to hope it goes viral? Sorry, The only things that go viral are videos of sneezing pandas. Not coattail riding, other-business using, make-me-a-friend-so-I-can-harvest-and-use-all-your-personal-data Facebook page coupons.
Friends don’t use friends.
America, ya gotta love it.